The present invention relates to the art of optical information storage and real-time parallel processing of signatures for identification.
In general, a signature may be anything that is detectable about an object which can be used to identify it as a unique object unto itself and/or to establish that it belongs to a class of objects. Radar signals, sonar signals, visual pictures, the objects themselves, may be used as signatures of a target. Systems under development digitize a return radar signal and use a computer with relatively sophisticated algorithms to match an unknown signature against a collection of known signatures or signature features. However, positive target identification is a problem and storage of a large number of signatures requires increasingly more space.